Citizen Responses to Donor-Centeredness in the US-China Public Diplomacy Competition

The rapid expansion of China’s public diplomacy initiatives has garnered significant scholarly and popular attention as it challenges the sphere of a more traditional public diplomacy player, the United States. China’s public diplomacy efforts are frequently criticized for being overly donor-focused in contrast with conventional public diplomacy efforts, a characteristic that presumably diminishes China’s influence. While all public diplomacy activities aim to win and gain hearts and minds of citizens, donor-centeredness refers to an approach that prioritizes the interests and goals of the donor country over the needs of the recipient countries. A donor-centered approach can be distinguished from a recipient-oriented approach by its greater emphasis on self-interest versus mutual benefits. Using a multi-country survey experiment administered in 13 countries, we estimated how donor-centeredness affects recipient citizens’ preferences for inbound public diplomacy initiatives in the context of the US-China strategic competition. We found that the donor-centric approach affects recipient citizens’ preferences for inbound public diplomacy initiatives in an unbalanced manner: a donor-centered project lowers recipient citizens’ support for an inbound Chinese public diplomacy project by 3.6 percentage points while donor-centeredness does not affect US public diplomacy to a meaningful extent.